Twitter Adds New Photo Gallery Feature

This blog post should start by mentioning that Twitter has made its own photo sharing service, pic.twitter.com. The roll out of that service was in June but is now available to all Twitter users. The hosting for the service is provided by Photobucket (you know, the site you used to house all your MySpace photos on?). This change negates the service of other popular photo sharing sites like Twitpic, Yfrog and even Instragram.

So… now that Twitter as its own photo sharing service, they have bulked up what photo sharing means. Now your photos will be shown on your profile in a gallery. The most recent will be the first ones displayed on your profile and then your followers can click to see more and view all of your photos.

What does this mean?

It means more people are going to see your Twitter photos. Right now, once you post a photo, it could be out of someone’s stream two minutes later. Now the images will be there longer. Plus, with Twitter controlling photo sharing, I think you will see more photo views.

A few other thoughts and observations:

The service still seems a little buggy but I am sure that will iron itself out.

People may take more care with their photos. Some people just slap up low quality photos to show a point or something that is happening at that very moment. Now that they are automatically added to a ‘Gallery’, users may take more care and consider their photos a more permanent fixture on their Twitter profile.

This could freak some people out. Some people use their account for both personal and business and may be uncomfortable with photos lingering around more publicly.

How did they already get your photos if they just launched the service? The went to the photo sharing sites tied to your account like Yfrog and Twitpic and took them. Tricky Twitter, very tricky.